Linus Torvalds lost his cool recently in official mailing list. His raw anger came in as a reaction when Mauro Carvalho Chehab, one of the Linux kernel maintainer introduced a buggy patch into the kernel but blamed pulseaudio software for the functionality break.

Here is what Mauro said :

Are you saying that pulseaudio is entering on some weird loop if the > returned value is not -EINVAL? That seems a bug at pulseaudio.

To this, Linus responded furiously in the same mailing list :

Mauro, SHUT THE F@#$ UP!

It's a bug alright - in the kernel. How long have you been a maintainer? And you *still* haven't learnt the first rule of kernel maintenance?

If a change results in user programs breaking, it's a bug in the kernel. We never EVER blame the user programs. How hard can this be tounderstand?

He did not stop at this and went on to say that the patch introduced was crap :

To make matters worse, commit f0ed2ce840b3 is clearly total and utter CRAP even if it didn't break applications.

Linus was in no mood to let the issue go, he questioned the competency of Mauro in this issue and took the ownership of applying the patch. He said :

Shut up, Mauro. And I don't _ever_ want to hear that kind of obvious garbage and idiocy from a kernel maintainer again. Seriously....you've shown yourself to not be competent in this issue, so I'll apply it directly and immediately myself.

Later even towards the end of the e-mail, Linus did not seem to calm down but explained the reason for his anger. He said :

WE DO NOT BREAK USERSPACE!

Seriously. How hard is this rule to understand? We particularly don't break user space with TOTAL CRAP. I'm angry, because your whole emailwas so _horribly_ wrong, and the patch that broke things was so obviously crap. The whole patch is incredibly broken shit.

He ended the e-mail with a couple of suggestions in his angry tone. He said :

Reading all this, Mauro did not have much words to defend himself. All he said was :

I'm doing my best rejecting patches that could potentially break userspace in advance.

Sometimes shit happens. Sorry for that.

Usually a silent guy, this type of reaction from Linus is not always expected. Although it's not the first time that Linus went all uncensored, he has also expressed a similar kind of anger for Nvidia too. All I can say is that not a great ending for Mauro's year.